Zoho Meeting in free public beta
The online office suite developers over at Zoho have launched their web meeting software into free public beta. I was part of the private beta and the service worked pretty darn well. There were some kinks that appear to have been worked out, and now it seems to be a very solid competitor to the other services out there.
In the public beta period Zoho Meeting is free, so if you want to try it out, now is the time. Meetings can be hosted/attended in just about any browser. The meeting client is available in ActiveX, Java, and Flash, so plenty of options for all potential setups.
One note, the “big three” meeting service we use here at work went away for about a week becuase of a bureaucratic issue on their end, and I was left to find a way to host client meetings on very short notice. I was able to use Zoho Meeting for these customer meetings and it worked great. Install for the customer was a breeze and we got the meetings done.
I don’t know what their pricing scheme will be when they go live, but I suspect it will be one of the lower cost solutions out there. I’m definitely keeping my eye out for their pricing chart as the functionality is just what I need.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Thanks for the kind words on Zoho Meeting. It is free during beta period, and will continue to have a free edition for consumers after the beta period. Our philosophy is to price things affordably. As a point of comparison, check out our Zoho CRM pricing, which has first 3 users free, and $12 per user/month beyond first 3 users.
Sridhar
June 19th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I tried Zoho Meeting and found it to be pretty nice. However, in my testing I was having issues with making it stop showing my desktop. I kept trying to stop it only to have people on the other end of the phone telling me they can still see my desktop. Kind of disconcerting.
I have been using Unyte (www.unyte.net) for a while now and like it. It’s free for up to 5 people joining. It has a SFDC link if you really care about that. I did a review for it a while back on my blog. I use it stand alone, though. They market themselves to the Skype crowd, but it’s just as good without Skype.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Hi Scott,
There should be a ‘Stop Sharing’ button/icon in the toolbar and in the system tray. Clicking on it will stop sharing your desktop. I’m sorry if it was not obvious. We will try to make it prominent…
If you had clicked on it and people still saw your desktop, it could possibly be the last screen you had before you stopped desktop sharing, worst case - (shouldn’t happen, could be a bug) - if this is not the case, please do let us know at support@zohomeeting.com We will try our best to fix it.
Btw, we also have Live Zoho Support
Cheers
SRK
June 20th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I looked at Unyte a few weeks back and it took over my computer, sending my CPU through the roof. I quickly uninstalled, once I could kill the process. I’m not sure what the issue was, but I didn’t get a chance to test it out. Glad that it’s working for you.